


After the Fall

by randomtrickpony



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Horses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 12:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomtrickpony/pseuds/randomtrickpony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raul is an old ghoul now, but he was once brother to a girl who reminds him very much of the Courier.  When his past and the present entwine over the Courier's search for Old World horses, he follows her, hoping for something he thought lost.  What he finds surprises everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Fall

**Author's Note:**

> This is an entry in the LJ Fallout Big Bang project. The Big Bang was a three-month collaborative effort in which an author and artist were paired to produce a work together. Below is my author entry. But before you get into reading it, please go check out Pharma Dream's half at http://8tracks.com/sharpworld/after-the-fall. It goes beautifully with the piece, I couldn't have asked for a better mood-setting soundtrack, and parts of the work below were actually added during editing because of what she chose. Please, enjoy!

  
It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.   
-Mexican Proverb

_Rafaela sat forward on the fence, her face pensive, her brow furrowed into harsh lines too old-seeming for the soft, delicate planes of her face.  She held a palm up to her lips and nibbled at some blueberries and a smaller division of strawberries, her fingers stained dark crimson and azure in the subtle morning heat._

_Raul hopped up beside her onto a rough pine log of the fence, sitting crossways, his already man-sized fingers working the cap from a homemade bottle of cool beer.  He finally popped it off using a sharp point on the fence and then pressed it to his lips, thinking he must surely look like a man as well, like his father, even though there are no adults to impress and only Rafaela._

_"Think she’ll have it soon?” Rafaela said, voice a whisper._

_She stared out into the dusty pasture before them.  The morning heat was already casting a wavering glaze over everything, sending ribbons of distortion from brittle grass to a sky the color of lapis and sapphires.  Not a single cloud sheltered them, or the pale gray horse a few feet into the enclosure, its belly pulled closer to the earth by the hope of a strong foal._

_Raul moved the bottle from his lips, thought in his fifteen years of life that he was so much wiser than his sister of only thirteen.  Why, the ranch hands already let him smoke with them, didn’t they?  A child wasn’t allowed to smoke with men, he was sure of that._

_“Hermana,” he said, trying to sound older, “you know like I do how soon it’ll be.  This isn’t like tossing sticks into the spring creek to see which will reach the other side, eh?”_

_Rafaela smiled, brushed an obsidian-dark braid from her shoulder and blinked up into the sun._

_“You’re wrong, Raul,” she replied, and her smile grew wider.  “I always know, because I throw my sticks all the way over the creek.  That way, I never miss the other side.”_

* * *

Raul breaks into consciousness with a moment of blinding disorientation.  Only the sizzling sound of a frying pan and the Courier’s gentle snicker anchor him to the present; Veronica’s hushed words and the welcoming scent of something like bacon pushing him on into further wakefulness.  He tries to snatch at the shard of a dream still hanging behind his eyes, but it slips away and he is mostly, he realizes, grateful.  Many of the things he’s seen within the last two-hundred years are far too crowded with ghosts to pursue in the light.

“Hey, _hombre_!”

He shifts the blanket off of his face.  The sun is just starting to burn light around the distant Sierra Nevada Mountains and the radiating warmth feels good across his cheeks…or what is left of them.

“ _Hombre_ , you hungry?” Veronica continues, twitching a bent spatula at him.

Veronica took to calling him ‘ _hombre_ ’ affectionately after learning that he knew Spanish fluently, a language she studied for a bit while still growing up in the bunkers.  It took him a day and a half to realize that she meant it in a friendly way, almost teasing.  It took him twice that amount of time to accept that she was willingly showing him affection, her shoulder bumping against his conspiratorially whenever the Courier said something particularly funny and she felt he should be laughing, not looking so tired and beaten-down.

“Ah, _sí_ ,” he answers.

“Well get your lazy ass up then,” she says, smiling softly as she picks up a dented metal plate and puts something onto it.

Raul uncurls slowly from the sleeping bag, his knees crackling and his back protesting that he is decades too ancient to meet with the ground every night and hope to walk away the next morning.

“I have gecko bacon and part of a deathclaw omelet left,” Veronica says, handing him the plate.

“Where did boss go?” he answers, wondering if the previous laughter had actually been another insubstantial ghost.  His fingers shake slightly as he takes the plate.   They always shake anymore unless he is holding the grip of a gun, and it aggravates him, just not enough to stop him from swiftly putting a strip of bacon into his ruined mouth.

“Went to go check out that mine we found last night.  You know the one that had all those nightstalkers inside it?  They don’t seem to bother her though.  Typical.  And it’s funny…almost like they, you know, like her?  Don’t you think that’s weird at all?”

Raul shrugs, noncommittal.  He is used to seeing too many odd things in life to say one way or another if the girl who leads their little band is anymore paranormal than anything else roaming the Mojave.

The scribe and ghoul sit in silence for a time, the smoke of their campfire drifting up into a hazy cerulean sky.  Raul quietly scoops up the rest of his omelet with a combat dagger, and Veronica watches a mutated fire ant moving slowly over a far off dune until Rex sits up, growling.  He was hidden underneath one of the sleeping bags, chewing on a couple of his front toe nails, and has finally smelled the ant.  Veronica puts a restraining arm around his furry shoulders, and pulls him closer so that she can rub him gently on the cheeks.

“Where do you think the Courier is leading us?” she says after letting the silence settle.

Raul swallows, thinks about this.  He is old enough to know that too much thinking can be just as bad as too little.  And really, does it matter to him anymore where they are going?  The Courier seems an interesting enough sort.  After all, she holds court over a kingdom of oddities and savages well enough.

“I think,” he says, sighing, “that she is leading us wherever she is needed.  That woman, she’s like the wind.  Like a desert storm.  She just goes where she wants.  Half of those she seems to meet laugh at her, and the other half just ignore her.  But then she does something, and pretty soon everyone isn’t doing anything but staring and they certainly tell a lot of stories about her afterword.  Makes me think maybe even an old ghoul like me has a place in this story.  Maybe it's the way that she acts like I’m needed?  I don't know.”

“Of course we need you,” Veronica says.  “You’re pretty good with that piece you carry.  I’ve seen you put Boone’s skills to shame, and he’s…pretty amazing with a rifle.”

Suddenly Rex sprints off across the dunes in the direction opposite the fire ant, and Veronica is left choking on the dust from his departure.  She yells some obscenity at him as she chucks the spatula and then struggles to her feet to go pick up it up.

But Raul is watching the horizon, seeing a girl trudging over the broken earth, a girl almost as dark as the land beneath her feet and gently golden in the morning light.  The Courier is walking slowly toward them, tugging something along behind her as Rex dances about her feet.  Veronica runs to greet them both, while Raul finishes his last strip of bacon and realizes that getting up is pointless, as she is headed to them anyhow.

She reminds him, oddly, of Rafaela.  Her skin is the golden-bronze of his long-gone sister’s, her hair tied back in a gleaming, black braid that falls between her shoulder blades and ends at her backside.  She isn’t much taller than he would have pegged Rafaela as growing into, five foot four perhaps, the heel on her cowboy boots adding maybe an inch.  The Courier’s eyes are also the same inquisitive slate-silver, almost blue, native eyes.  She claimed, when he asked, that it was probably a tribal thing.  But Raul knows them only as eyes belonging to a memory from Mexico, and wishes in some way that he can explain to her why he couldn’t meet them properly when she talked to him for the first time.

She drags along over the dirt, pausing to tug at the metallic object behind her again and again until she is close enough that Veronica runs over and shoos Rex away, helping her pull the twine she twisted over it the rest of the way down the hill.  Finally, she is close enough to the dying embers of the morning fire that Raul is curious.  He stands up and comes over, wiping at his forehead, careful not to pull off any skin that may be still attached enough to be painful.

The Courier moves the rusty object into view, and suddenly Raul is a thousand miles away, in Mexico, and over two-hundred years younger.

It is a metallic robot, a robot that looks like a creature he thought gone to memory.

* * *

  _Rafaela and their abuela, Sonja, built the grey mare a small paddock to have her foal in when the time came.  Normally, caballos had their babies out among the velvet mesquite and the yellow-flowered brittle bush, in the shade of a craggy ledge or where they could see around them, beneath the shade of a Joshua tree.  But this foal would be special, the mare a present from their father, Santiago.  Rafaela had chosen her breeding, to a strong stallion only a few miles from Mexico City, and was too eager to not look into every detail._

_The foal slid out onto the straw under a sky that was nothing but clouds; clouds the same color as the mare that paced across the small, rough paddock; clouds that brought with them a strange, cooling wind.  It was a wind blowing toward the south, bringing forth a bite, fogging the breath of both cattle and horses.  Raul did not see any reason to complain, however.  The wind was refreshing, if a bit humid, as he helped the other ranch hands, Alonzo and Ramirez, round the bull calves from that year’s breedings into holding pens for castration and branding._

_Around noon, Rafaela ran out to the holding pens, waving her dirty bonnet in the air until Raul trotted his own mount back to where she stood, jumping up and down by the side of the fence._

_“Mara had him!  She had him!”  she said, nearly breathless._

_And that was that._

_Raul followed his sister out of the sun and to the lee of the house, where the pen was built.  Inside the mare, Mara, stood guard, a little colt nestled close to her flank, his legs still trembling in the new grip of gravity.  He was like a little slip of slate against her slightly lighter hide, odd blackish marks running over his body in bands.  He looked brindled, like a sky unsure if it wished to hold its own or storm._

_“_ _Papá_ _said he might be a grulla,” she whispered excitedly, barely restraining her hands from reaching toward the foal._

_Raul had no idea what a grulla was.  He thought the horse looked like its painter had been both drunk and confused.  But he wouldn’t tell Rafaela that, it would hurt her._

* * *

“Caballo,” Raul says, his word a tight whisper in his throat.

“What’s-" the Courier says, hesitating.  She glances at the Veronica in confusion.

“Horse,” whispers Veronica, softly.  Her many hours in the scribe’s library and listening in on hushed conversations in Spanish between Raul and Arcade finally seem to be paying off.  She at least knows this word, though not its true meaning.

“What is a-”the Courier says, tries again, to which Veronica shrugs.

“A horse,” Raul says.  “That is merely a sort-of horse, eh?  Did they have any books where you were from Veronica, books that showed old world cowboys?”

Veronica shakes her head.  They had, have still, many books back at the bunkers.  But most of them are about machinery and mathematics.  Very few detail life before the bombs.  Most of those were considered useless, signs of an era better left forgotten, lest it be repeated.

Raul starts to explain to them everything a horse was, everything a horse had been to him, and stops, unable to find words for the flood of emotions welling deep within him for the first time in many years.

The Courier looks over at the strange beast she is pulling on, tilts her head and admires it from a different angle.

“Can you make it work?” she asks, finally.

Raul considers it, comes closer and touches the metallic neck where rust has gathered along grooves that signify a mane.  He remembers what horse hair felt like.  It was rough, coarse against his palm as he ran fingers though it and twisted apart knots, helping Rafaela braid manes and tails on lazy, warm days.

“I think I can make it move again.  Will you help me Veronica?”

The girl nods, her hood falls forward into her eyes, and she blushes when the Courier laughs.

***

Raul and Veronica scavenge for what parts the metallic horse needs and the Courier ropes in Lily and Cass to help.  Arcade is interested in the strange beast, but Boone outright ignores it.  ED-E even beeps soulfully at it, than offers in its own way to help with removing bolts and welding new components.  Gradually things come together, and it is a welcome diversion from Caesar and the Dam.

It takes all of them three weeks to fix the strange pre-war beast, and when the switch is flipped its eyes light up and it makes a sound that causes Rex to run several feet away, then stop, barking.

“Is that a horse?” the Courier asks as it jerks around the broken asphalt in front of the Lucky 38.  A crowd is starting to gather.  The girls in front of the Gomorrah have stopped dancing, and one soldier draws a revolver.

“Not really,” Raul says.  “Sort of…but not really.  Horses are bigger.  They…they _were_ beautiful animals.  To a cowboy, the men who once spent days on their backs and herded the ancestors of brahmin, the horse was freedom.”

Veronica turns off the mechanical horse and then, for several weeks, nobody talks about horses.  Which is, considering President Kimball’s visit to the Dam, actually borne of necessity.  The Courier saves him with Rex’s help, and then Veronica and Raul follow her back through the ruins of Boulder City toward Vegas.

The dead city of Boulder is a mess of bared steel girders and dusty concrete slabs, and when they bed down amongst the ruins, the ghosts find Raul again, and pull him under.

* * *

_Two months later, Rafaela stood on the porch close to Raul and Santiago, drawing water into a bucket from an old rum barrel for Mara, and the new foal Trueno.  His name means 'thunder', the sound Rafaela told Raul hoofbeats make if you put your ear to the earth.  She also told him it was her favorite sound, though he doesn’t understand why anybody would want to willingly press their ear into dirt and listen for something as simple as caballos._

_She brought the bucket up and moved to slide the top back on, looking out toward Mexico City, and that was the moment when everything changed._

_The flash was so intense that Sonja fell from her wicker rocker with a scream of pain.  Rafaela put up a hand, whimpered, and Raul fell to the dusty planks of the porch, afraid.  When Raul looked up again his father was opening the screen door to the porch and his abuela was crying something in Spanish, but he couldn’t understand because her words were muffled, and she was lying on her front and couldn’t get up.  He ran over to help her, and realized that Rafaela was sobbing too, the water bucket overturned on her legs, her eyes moving around but not appearing to see anything._

_“_ _Mamá_ _!” she said, her voice strangled and pleading in a way he had never heard before.  “Mamá mis ojos!_ _Mamá_ _!”_

_She curled into a little ball as another flash lit the horizon, to the east, out beyond Mexico City again.  Raul was bent down to help up Sonja and so merely caught it out of the corner of his eyes.  It left his vision slightly blurred, as if he were staring up at the sun and couldn’t find the sense to turn away._

_He pulled at Sonja gently, moved her over onto her back.  It took him several confused seconds to realize his abuela was praying, not merely crying.  He did not understand what the flashes meant, had no concept of atoms and bombs and the end of his world._

_Raul looked back at Rafaela and realized Juanita, their mother, was beside her now.  She was looking over her daughter when he finally steadied Sonja and helped her back into her rocker.  Ramirez came up onto the porch, and Raul glanced up at him for guidance._

_“What the hell was that?” he said, turning to Santiago._

_“A bomb,” Santiago answered.  “They actually did it, fuck them all.  They dropped one…no, they dropped two.”_

_Raul knew that his father normally cursed when he was out with the ranch hands, but to curse in front of women was something Raul himself had been beaten for.  He was too afraid to say anything though, because whatever had just happened was far worse._

_Juanita took Rafaela inside, and her other two brothers and two sisters huddled close, afraid, as she washed her daughter’s eyes very gently with a damp cloth.  Raul went to go get some ice for the spot where Sonja had bruised her face, and when he came back Ramirez and Santiago were arguing about something.  Eventually Ramirez saddled up a horse and left in the direction of Mexico City, and Raul realized he was worried about his family._

_Raul didn’t think there was any point in going, and he didn’t think they would see Ramirez again._

_Rafaela lost her sight in that moment, and after that, saw only shadows and vague outlines.  She cried the first night until her pillow was soaked in wet saltwater and blood, which seeped from where her corneas had blistered.  And when the next morning came, she lifted her bucket to try and get water for the horses, but tripped and dropped it halfway out to the paddock.  Raul was following her, quietly, not wanting her to think he thought she couldn’t do it.  When she fell, he helped her up and ran back to get more water.  Rafaela stood out in the sun and started to cry again, until Raul put his arm around her shoulder._

_“How will I feed an’ water Mara and Trueno?” she asked softly, trying to stop her tears.  But she was in too much pain, and they carved tiny rivulets of visible anguish down her face, burning her eyes further.  
_

_Raul started to guide her along, his vision still hazy, but workable._

_“I’ll help you Hermana, It’ll be okay, I’ll help you.”_

* * *

The Courier.  Raul realizes one day that he has never asked her name.  Veronica calls her ‘Joe’.  The first time she does this the Courier looks at her, sticks out her tongue, and then laughs.  But to Raul, she is always the brown-skinned girl with the inquisitive hands and the sharp eyes.  She needs _his_ name, but he has held onto too many to need hers.

The Courier seems to have a similar affection-or lack thereof-for titles.  She meets with Caesar but once, then never has any reason to talk with him again.  When Veronica questions her as to her thoughts on the Legion, she replies only that Ed Sallow is interesting, and intelligent, but not smart, and that will be his undoing.  Arcade chuckles at this, and it actually garners an interesting grunt from Boone…and perhaps a smirk.

It is this inquisitiveness that leads her and Rex to Mick and Ralph’s on an oddly rainy Saturday, Rex shaking himself off at the stoop as they enter.  Their crier, Tommy, is loitering close to the inside of the door and Rex attempts a companionable sniff, then tries to pee on the boy’s leg before she calls him further into the shop.  Mick gives her one look, then smiles and tells her he’s got something she’ll like.  He disappears back into his storage rooms, and comes back with a parcel, wrapped in oilcloth.  When unwrapped, it reveals the hide of an animal, pelt shining like burnished copper.  It is large, the Courier has never seen anything like it, and she instantly loves it.  The sale, for Mick, is astonishingly instant.

Raul explains later, once more slightly unnerved, that it is not a brahmin hide, but the hide of a horse.  Veronica brushes fingers over it longingly, then sits back to read a book Arcade has plundered for her about cowboys in some ruin beyond The Strip.  Rex snuffles at it, and Lily talks of seeing them in ‘the pictures’ when she was a little girl in her vault.  The Courier asks her to describe horses, and Lily only remarks that they looked fast enough to outrun anything, and were always brave and loyal to little girls.

* * *

  _Refugees came slowly from Mexico City, and then all at once in billowing waves to which there was no end.  They walked in little groups, or alone.  Some completely avoided the ranch, crying and screaming in the night, bodies covered in bleeding sores, their skin sloughing off even as they moved into the sunny hell beyond.  Others, children and grieving parents and singles merely alone, walked to the ranch and loitered for a bit, unsure of which direction to take._

_Juanita helped those she could.  She rationed food and offered little bits to the travelers that seemed in good enough health to possibly make it, but her eyes were afraid whenever she greeted anyone at the door._

_Raul told the Courier, much later in his life, that he had been in his thirties when all of this happened.  That he was a troublemaker, made poor decisions, but never killed a man.  He did not tell her that he was a scared boy trying to be a man, that he was only in trouble because he wanted to be noticed, that he would kill and kill and kill again because that was what he needed to do._

_No, none of that happened as he told her, because the truth was too terrible to remember._

_It was his watch night when a band of men Santiago turned away came back to the ranch and turned their cattle lose.  He heard the cows lowing and then the crunch and scuffle of boots, the sounds that awoke him and made him realize how badly he’d failed everyone.  He leapt up and looked out a window, then ran to his father and mother’s room, shaking his father silently until Santiago rose and went to the window, sneaking as Raul did._

_When he saw the men he went for his shotgun, and Raul snuck to his brother’s room to get his own revolver.  After that there was chaos, and fire, and Raul tried later to forget as much as he could, because he couldn’t live with how much he failed them all._

_Raul’s lungs were burning as he hoisted Rafaela out of the window.  His face was covered in soot and he was afraid that everyone else was dead, and yet knew for certain that they were.  He pushed her down into a little spot behind the house, and she crawled across the sand, the vivid light making it easier for her to see shapes and motion with her dim vision._

_They inched along, Raul wishing he could see the looters more clearly through the smoke.  But shooting blindly, if his parents had by chance made it out of the burning building, might mean that he could strike them._

_“Wait!” Rafaela cried when they were just out of sight and over the side of an embankment. She flung herself back onto the sand and then into the pen where Mara still waited, opening the gate and urging the two caballos out into the night.  Her hands were swift over the mare’s mane, and when she dropped them she clutched a hacked off bit of horsehair in one fist, a talisman of remembrance against the darkness that they faced._

_A bullet skipped sharply into the sand beside her left heel, and a shout echoed in the blackness between the main house and the makeshift stall.  Mara screamed, frightened, and leapt out into the darkness, foal bounding at her heels, his little tuft of a tail raised high in fright.  Raul shot into the darkness with his own piece, heard a gasp behind them, and hauled Rafaela with him over the nearest hill and into a gully._

_They lay in silence for a while, listening to the steady thrum of locusts and faint hoof beats a long way off.  Finally, Rafaela crawled across the gully and signaled for Raul to follow.  There was no other way to go now, but toward the city that everyone had fled._

* * *

Nine days later, Raul finds the Courier gone.  There is a jolt of confusion from Boone and Lily, and Arcade appears worried, but Raul knows.  They find her note on the dining room table in the Lucky 38, her words those of a girl that finally feels that the Dam is not her fight.  But, Raul knows, and he knows better.

Veronica comes to him as he packs that afternoon.  She sits on the bed as he carefully arranges his old Petro-Chico jumpsuit next to his vaquero chaps and some pre-war casualwear to match what he already has on.

“I miss Joe,” she says, “and I want to see the horses too, _hombre_.”

He is not one to tell anyone what to do, he only nods and swings the string attached to his sombrero around his throat.

“Figure you’ll need a few minutes to pack then,” he answers.

“Yes,” she says, a whisper, and then her footsteps slide away and down the hall.

When it comes time to tell everyone where they are going, Raul only mentions that he thinks he knows where the Courier went, but is not certain.  Veronica gives him a sidelong glance that says that she is, but he doesn’t want to enlist any more members for their posse, to listen to ridicule when they realize he intends to find the Courier and then to continue on for the beasts known only in myth to those before him.  He will not be coming back to the Mojave for some time, and he would rather not voice it, not even to himself.

They take Rex, because his nose can sniff her out and he is smart enough to know what they seek.  When they set off from Freeside they are alone, and the evening enfolds around them and offers only cool solitude.

The trail is many endless weeks and incredible bouts of missing the Courier only by hours.  She leads them up through California, past ruined skyscrapers and dead looters and camps of scavengers eating nothing but dog and trying to survive.  He has seen all of these things before, but Veronica has not, and her eyes widen and her breath catches occasionally, especially when she is faced with dying children wanting food she cannot give.

After hearing her cry herself to sleep for the third night in a row, Raul avoids cities and sticks to forests, allowing Veronica to pet Rex and contemplate her sanity alone.  They enter the edges of northern California, and stare up at the scorched remains of redwoods, some of them sheared in half but amazingly growing, their bark resistant to fire and radiation and mankind’s wonton need to obliterate.

“The stars shine better out here.”

Veronica gazes out from the edge of their fire later that night, up at the ebon sky.  “Don’t you think so?”

Raul can’t say, so he merely nods.  His eyes aren’t so good anymore, but he remembers warm summer nights, lying against his own horse’s back, gazing up into the vault above.  As a child, he’d read books about aliens and spaceships, but over time his life has become something far more outlandish than any dime novel.

This is nice; he reasons as he leans back and closes his eyes.  This is far better than many of the other things in his past.  Tonight that is once more, enough.

* * *

_Rafaela kept the braid of horse hair in a pocket of her dirty dress.  Blisters developed on the backs of her hands and then faded, but the blurring shadows in her vision still did not.  She stopped coughing up little bits of blood after the second week, though she was clearly still weak as they searched through the rubble in the city for anything to eat._

_Raul felt so bad, not only for her, but for himself.  He had been very weak lately, and not just from hunger.  When they found a costume shop one night to hide and sleep in, Rafaela wore a gown made of satin and Raul pulled on a gaudy-looking vaquero outfit, complete with chaps and a sombrero.  Rafaela laughed until she choked, then was silent for a long time after, just staring into space._

_“What do you think happened to Trueno?” she said one night, without any prior notice._

_Raul didn’t want to answer her questions right now.  The skin was starting to flake off the backs of his hands.  It wasn’t healing like Rafaela’s had, but he couldn’t tell exactly whether or not he was dying.  Internally he felt nauseous and unable to focus, his mind clouded by a millions sensations of pain across his flesh.  And at night, when they tried to sleep, the pain turned to itching until his skin waxed greyish and started to fall off like the scales of a rattlesnake._

_“What do you think happened to that caballo estúpido?  He died and burned, quit being dumb Hermana.”_

_Rafaela gave him an odd look.  It was not an expression of anger, but one of confusion._

_“You didn’t see him die,” she said, very softly.  “He just ran off.  He had his_ _mamá, nobody shot him.  Maybe he found other wild horses?”_

_“And maybe he didn’t,” Raul answered, pushing even though every part of him but his bleeding lips was screaming at him for silence.  “Maybe his smelly corpse is picked clean by vultures now, whiter than that ugly hide of his ever was.”_

_Rafaela sighed, kicking a stone out across the pocked and fractured earth.  “That’s mean, Raul,” was all she said.  “You’re all I’ve got; I don’t even have Abuela anymore.  Why would you say that?”_

_She might as well have slapped him._

* * *

They catch up to the Courier outside of New Medford, in a place that was once called Oregon.  There is a small trading post there, a couple brahmin and a bighorner, two men.  The Courier is leaning on the counter talking animatedly to one of them and he is laughing, but in a jovial way that bespeaks of a new friendship.  Veronica gives a happy shout, and the Courier turns, gives them a confused glance.  Then she waves as Veronica runs up and grabs her in a tight embrace.  They laugh together for a moment, before Raul breaks into the reunion.

“Not even a note, boss?”

“Raul, I know you never needed a note before.”

Then she smiles, and Raul wonders what is this ‘before’ and what she truly ‘knows’.

“You’re chasing something dead,” he answers, suddenly feeling stubborn.

“Hardly,” she says, smirking now.  “Come see.”

She nods to the man she was joking with earlier and he gestures them back with a hand, leading them behind the booth and toward the small shack where supplies are kept.  There is an enclosure made of rusted metal and broken plywood.  Inside is a beast Raul recognizes but cannot quite place in the shadows of his mind.

The creature stands still, watches them; its first instinct that of any prey animal, to freeze.  He is unsure what it is at first.  The grey coat is brindled as it was in memory, but the hooves are split into three toes, one large one digging into the dirt, two smaller flanking it.  And the creature’s head is divided awkwardly in the middle, so that the thing bears two normal eyes and an odd sort of milky-pale orb in the center of its forehead.  A spike of bone protrudes from its sore-coated muzzle, and it has fangs, sharp stallion-teeth grown to predatory proportions.

It regards him for a handful of moments longer, and then paws the dust, nickering.  It does not appear afraid of them, and neither Veronica nor the Courier move to touch it.  Raul wants to reach out a hand, to feel if it is real.  But, he knows better.

The beast that is nothing but a ghost of what a horse was regards the ghoul that is all that is left of a man.  Raul remembers the wild carrots Veronica gathered earlier and pulls one out of his pocket, pushes it across the expanse between them and lets the mutant thing sniff it.  The horse does, breath warm and sweet-smelling.  Raul cannot shake the fact that it looks like Trueno, and he wonders why he ever doubted the fact that the foal escaped.

“There are more in the hills,” she says, words like ice through his ancient veins.  “Would you teach me how to make them ours?”

* * *

  _Rafaela did not come home the next evening._

_Raul was too muddled by pain to notice at first.  He sat against the side of their shelter, breathing very slowly, peeling cracked skin off of the back of one of his hands.  When the stars started their wheeling journey above him, he nodded his head forward in misery, trying to sleep, and then just as suddenly jerked awake._

_His eyes scanned the shadows, and he realized that she had not returned.  He wanted to get up and look for her right away, but it was dangerous at that time of the night, and he can barely stand.  Finally, after teetering on the edge of indecision for the better part of twenty minutes, Raul limped out of their shelter and down the alley._

_He found her only feet from an old silo, or what was left to find.  Her head was hacked off, her body violated, dress nothing but a dirty rag around one arm that could not offer any modesty.  He thought at first that it was just some other poor scavenger, but there was a tiny crescent scar on the corpse’s knee, and he knew that scar, because he had slept near it so many nights in this long hell he now called his life._

_Raul stumbled back into the shelter and pressed himself against the cool tiles.  Inside his head were a million voices and thoughts and feelings, none of them leading to a reality he wanted to continue living.  His family was dead, his sister was dead, the world was dead, he was not dead.  Why?_

_There was no answer to this, and Raul sobbed into the cool tiles until pain dropped him into blessed darkness._

_Eventually, Raul got up to go find food; there was nothing much left to do.  He drifted over the broken road until he heard a few raiders talking about the little girl they’d ‘scored’ last night.  It took him seconds to realize it was probably Rafaela, and then the raiders had no reason to worry about needing to ‘score’ anything, ever again.  Raul spit on their corpses and walked away, figuring that, if it turned out they weren’t Rafaela’s killers, then they didn’t deserve life anyway._

_After that he took the vaquero costume and put it to the one use he felt it could give him, and he played the part well enough to garner bounties and jobs and even his own fair share of legends.  And that was when Raul slowly realized that, despite wanting to find death, death simply could not see fit to return the favor.  He took the forty-four and dealt justice as seemed fair, but life would never be fair to him._

* * *

Veronica now has the horse-creature eating grass from her palm.  All three of them work at getting it to let them near, to let them do more than tie a rope around its neck and drag it everywhere with them.  Well…not drag exactly; it only seems to be following them because they feed it.

The Courier is not upset that she used all of her earnings from The Strip to buy him.  She seems a bit worried about the rest of their family back at the Lucky 38 though.

“But this is important,” she tells them.  “Horses will help us, even more than brahmin.  They’re better than the NCR’s trucks, better than bighorners.  They’ll let you ride them, right Raul?”

Raul eyes the thing she is calling a horse.  The thing eyes him.  He wonders who is uglier, and whether God is truly playing a joke on them all. 

He tries to explain.  “Boss, this is not just a horse, it is a stallion.  If you think male humans are hard to get to do what you want, imagine if they weighed a few thousand pounds more and used every sharp part of their body to try to send you to the grave.  I am amazed that he will even let you lead him.”

“We had a talk,” she says, glancing at him.  “We have reached an understanding.”

Veronica chuckles, and Raul shakes his head.  Perhaps, he reasons, it is like her and the nightstalkers.  He decides not to ask what sort of ‘understanding’ they have worked out.

Three nights later, they are far deeper into the struggling woods which lead back to California.  Veronica is feeding the horse some white flowers she found near a rotten log, and he nuzzles his leathery muzzle into her palm.  She can now run her hand over his withers, and the Courier is getting him to pick up his feet for her.  Raul can pet him, and has rested a shirt on his back, but the stallion still seems skittish, too skittish to even attempt to sit upon.

Yet tonight the horse is on edge, watching the woods even while he eats, ears swiveling about and breath uneven until it culminates in him lifting his head and giving out a muffled scream.  Veronica falls back, and an answering voice cuts through the quiet death of the burnt-out forest.

Another horse steps into their clearing, its eyes roving about, then lays back its ears and sidles away from them.  It moves along toward the stallion, trying to avoid them with a mixture of fear and stubborn curiosity.

“I don’t want them to fight,” the Courier says, coming toward the stallion to shoo the other one away.

“That is a mare,” Raul answers ruefully.  “I doubt fighting is what she has in mind.”

The Courier backs away and stands with Veronica, and they watch the two come closer, touch ugly muzzles together.  The stallion bugles again, moving his head up and down, arching his neck and tail.  The mare, however, kicks at him and then goes to stand a short distance away.  She appears, to Raul, to like him and wants to stick around.  But she isn’t about to put up with any sort of flattery, she will let him know when his advances are welcome.

“She certainly has her opinions, doesn’t she?”  Veronica says, covering her mouth with a hand.

“Don’t they all,” Raul says, smiling.

The Courier elbows him and then turns to walk back to the place she has cleared for a fire.  She starts the fire, then wraps the blanket she has made from the chestnut horsehide around herself, Rex leaning on her feet.  Watching the flames, she pulls the leather chord from her hair, and then fluffs it, sends the ink-dark waves rolling down her back.

* * *

_They called her the Lady Claudia, but Raul knew what she was, and he saw no shame in it.  When she sat out on her sheltered veranda in Tucson-not Two-Sun, what a damn, dumb name-sunbathing, occasionally topless, other times dressed in gowns beautiful in a time even before the Great War, Raul found he looked at something other than her body every time._

_She came to the town weeks earlier.  A poor girl, young, dressed in only a dirty old world dress with a pale brown scarf tied over her hair.  Nobody would take her in, and eventually she drifted into the only harbor which welcomed her, though nothing about her later on suggested she felt any unhappiness over the lack of options._

_Her eyes were blue, and her chin strong but subtle, melding well against her neck.  She was lithe and kind and when he would see her winding her way down the street some evenings, seeking a suitor or solace, he almost stopped her several times, but for reasons he didn’t understand._

_One evening, when he did not see her in the street, he finally went to her House, and requested an audience._

_“She’s not well,” the woman at the door said, her face peeking out shyly from their stoop.  “But I can make you not miss ‘er at all, ghouly.  What’s your…passion?”_

_Raul shook his head and smiled, realizing he was slightly embarrassed and he didn’t even know why._

_“I just want to talk with her,” he said.  “I knew her when she was a girl; I’m an old family friend.”_

_The woman looked him up and then sideways.  She brushed a strand of ruddy-brunette hair away from one painted cheek and then sighed._

_“Very well.  But if the Mistress catches you a-lyin’ about this, won’t be my hide she tans.”_

_She led him through the doorway into a sitting room designed around pre-war wealth.  A polished piano sat in one corner, and various lounge chairs and fainting couches occupied empty spaces on the wooden floor.  It took Raul back, even to a time before his own.  He imagined gunslingers and dancing girls, quiet moments with cigars and pretty faces._

_The girl lead him up a staircase where even the banister was polished, and then down the hall to a room with the door open a crack, light glowing around the edges.  She pointed and then walked away, glancing over her shoulder only once._

_Raul reached out for the doorknob, then hesitated.  It felt wrong for a moment; he should not be here, in a brothel.  But the force that drove him to this would not relinquish its final hold, and he knocked gently._

_“Hello?  Come in?”_

_Claudia was sitting upon a queen-sized bed, her hair undone and lying down her bare back like dark waves on an unknowable sea.  She looked over her shoulder, pulled the fur blanket she had on her lap around her modestly.  The lamplight made her look even younger than she was, and Raul almost turned to go._

_“I asked Lorna not to send up any gentleman callers…I’m sorry sir I-”_

_She pulled the hide closer, and Raul recognized it, knew what he really thought of, who he thought of, when he saw Claudia.  Suddenly his awkwardness was gone, and he smiled, feeling foolish._

_“That is horse hide,” he explained, waving toward the blanket.  “Where did you get such an old thing?”_

_“I knew I was right,” she said, nodding, not at all disturbed by this sudden need for conversation.  “I told the man I bought it from that it was not some ancient cow, but he said there were never any such beasts as horses.  But I’ve heard the stories too, I-”_

_“I used to have a horse,” Raul finished for her, smiling again, but this time ruefully._

_Claudia looked stunned for a moment, then she scooted aside a spot so that Raul could sit next to her.  When he hesitated, she merely patted the spot._

_“You are not offended?” he asked, cautiously._

_“I have known far worse to grace this room,” she said, “then a lonesome ghoul who wants only to comfort a stained lady.  Sit and we shall talk, I’d like that.”_

_So Raul sat, carefully, next to her.  She moved closer to him moments later, her beautiful eyes wide and no longer so sad._

_“So you wish to hear about them?”_

_“Yes, please,” she asked, her voice a tiny whisper in the dim glow of a handful of candles._

_***_

_When Dirty Dave and his brothers took Claudia, and Raul avenged her, he remembered the horse blanket pulled over her thin legs on that dark night, and the girlish way that she laughed when he finally told her she reminded him of Rafaela.  Later he would tell the Courier that he looked after her ‘in his own way’ and never met her in any place she would remember him for.  But stories told to others are just that, stories.  And an old man’s mind is prone to forget what his boot soles do not._

_When the time came, he dug her a grave.  He wrapped her ruined body in only the hide blanket, and buried her facing the east, overlooking the hills of Tucson that she once watched from her balcony.  It somehow seemed right.  And then he travelled on.  And on._

* * *

The mare follows them over the course of the next three days.  The stallion becomes more difficult for the Courier to manage, so she turns him loose from the picket line at night.  In the morning, he and the mare are always back, and she seems to have decided she likes him enough to stay permanently.  Raul begins to wonder if the Courier really can talk to animals.  Most stallions would have run away seconds after the makeshift halter was gone.

“I think we’ll have three horses soon,” Veronica says as they cross the California line and head into Nevada one hot afternoon months later.  “Spotty looks fatter.”

Spotty is not the best name, but the mare is, really, quite ‘spotty’.  She flights about wherever she chooses, and though she will stop for a pet or a piece of Joshua tree fruit, she is gone just as quickly into the desert.  Her coat is also dappled, the color of soot and rain puddles in various painted marks all over her body.

Raul nods.  “Apparently they can breed; she does look like she will have a foal in a few months.”

When they arrive back at the doors to the Lucky 38, Spotty is paraded before Mr. Houses’ sensors because he does not believe horses still exist.  When he mentions how ugly she is, the Courier leads her away and starts to build a stable behind the decrepit casino, plotting how she will finally rid herself of his judgments as she drives nails into boards.

 ***

 And, three years later, when the Battle for the Dam is nothing but a story told to NCR recruits, the Courier sits on the back of the colt Spotty bore all those years ago, now a stallion, and Raul imagines only Rafaela and Trueno; because from this angle, in the fading shadows between the sagebrush and the dust, the memory and the truth of what is before him are one. 

They are another part of the thrill of Vegas now, the horse, the whole herd that his new family amassed from various treks to the arid stretches of Oregon and California.  Very soon, Raul realizes, those in Freeside will have horse-drawn carts.  The Mojave express has even requested a few for a dispatch division.  Young children come by every day to help with stall cleaning, and seem enamored even with the hard work.  And the Courier turns to smile at him then, a mischievous smile, a clever smile. 

“I think he needs a name now, Raul,” she says, smile sinking to mysterious.  “What do you say, I like Trueno…you told me it means ‘thunder’, right?  I love the sound their hooves make against the ground.  Don’t you?”

Women and horses, Raul muses.  He has lost and found them both after the fall, and still they are as much a mystery as before.  And he is okay with that, even if he must live a hundred years more.  Having mystery there, after all, gives him something to live for.


End file.
